Unknown Relationship

Here's a little animatic I did a year ago based on my misperceptions:

Were they lovers...

...strangers..

...or just good friends?

Sketchbook

After scanning in over 1000 and counting doodles and drawings from the past year or so, every night as I lay in bed, a delicious new image pops up in my head, only to be forgotten and undrawn by morning.

After days of digitally pulling pencil from paper and six audiobooks, I’m getting sick of scanning but I’m burning to finish.

Feel free to browse my rough work while I venture to employ myself with a more creative activity.

Sketchbook Part 1

Sketcbook Part 2

You’ll soon see these drawings cropping up in different ways; collaged, colored, and put in motion.

Farm

My generation is at this indecisive point between old and new technology. I learned how to print photographs with chemicals, I’m going to learn woodblock printing and how to make paper. I learned the whole process of lost-wax bronze casting and other techniques involving some crazy don’t-let-it-touch-your-skin chemicals. And yet I’m going digital, partly because I don’t want to cut myself off from the momentum of graphic technology at such a young age. Still, all this computer stuff has been driving me a bit crazy. The programs have yet to sink into my regular process. I needed to get away from it and clear my head. So I went to a farm with two friends and worked and drew some things analog. Of course I scanned them in and colored them:



Life drawing. I actually did see some clouds like that (though not by the mountains).




The face in the tree – a half from life, half from imagination fabrication.




And cartoon memories of my friend in the lake.

Landscapes

I’m always an artist at the core, but revolving around that I have these phases of side-interests; For a while I was extremely interested in how understanding the science of how we see can be used in understanding how to make what we can see (art), sometimes I focus on (especially on the subway) what is the meaning of and the use of the time between an action and the result a.k.a. what is the role of waiting and its subsets of boredom, side-tracking, anticipation, and dread in our lives and our perceptions and acceptances of time and mortality, then of course sometimes I think about nothing, sometimes I contemplate my thighs, and lately I have a new material interest in mastering graphics software and using them for animation and illustration. I haven’t really started my new animation yet (which worries me – I felt stuck and scared when I tried to really dive into it) but I have been editing some of my scanned drawings such as these in this little landscape diptych:












I really love the control the computer gives you over color but I’m still a little wary over its materiality.

Hello!

I draw a ton of weird stuff, but it’s been hard to figure out what to do with it all. Last summer I cut out a lot of these drawings and pasted them into a scroll that would act as a surrogate sketchbook, but I soon realized that that was a dumb idea - it damaged the works and did nothing more to them, although the mechanism I made for viewing the scroll was kinda cool. Then I discovered animation, and I realized that I could, instead of working out every detail of a drawing, elevating it to art by making it on fancy paper and finishing it to look all polished (and stilted) I could instead integrate these works into an animation by using them as character designs, poses, etc. In this animation, because no one taught me anything in that class, even though I supposedly go to the best art school in this fine country, I recorded my careful line drawings stop motion style with a lousy DV camera. It has no layers, no color (except on the cut-out parts), no computer effects, and yet I’m fairly pleased with it:



But now that I’ve discovered animation, I’ve discovered what’s been right in front of me for so many years, my computer. And so, I am now beginning to archive my drawings via my new scanner and edit them in Photoshop and Painter via my brand spanking new Wacom Cintiq 12WX which I don’t know what I did without. This summer I’m taking a digital compositing class that essentially teaches me After Effects, I’m deciding on whether to learn Flash or Toon Boom, and I’m making some stuff that’s fun to look at. And so this blog will be a sort of process journal and showcase of my work as I move into the twenty-first century with my 2D artwork. Enjoy!